19" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part VIII.. Page 7

Another article in our 19-inch roundup series will be devoted to 12 monitor models from such well-known brands as ASUS, BenQ, HP, LG, NEC, Samsung and Viewsonic. Besides discussing their features we will also dwell on the details of brand name image-enhancing settings offered by the monitor makers these days.

The brightness and contrast are set at 90% and 80%, respectively, by default. Reducing them both to 56% leads to a 100nit white. As opposed to the previous model, the VW192s controls its brightness by means of pulse-width modulation of the backlight lamps at a frequency of 238Hz.

The average backlight irregularity is 19% on black and 14% on white. The maximum deflections are 35% and 24%, respectively. I wouldn’t call it a big change over the previous version.

Color gradients are reproduced normally at any brightness/contrast settings except that a small portion of lights merge into white at a contrast value higher than 90%.

The gamma curves are not ideal, but close to the theoretical one, just as it was the case with the previous version of the monitor. I don’t have serious complaints about the resulting image. Alas, the reduction of contrast doesn’t improve the curves: their shape and relative positions do not change.

The temperature modes haven’t become any more accurate. There is a 2000K difference between the levels of gray in each of the five available modes; darks tend to be bluish. Yes, the temperature of the sRGB mode is now closer to the required one, but only on white. It is still too high on darks.

As you might have expected, the color gamut hasn’t changed.

The response time hasn’t changed, either. It is 15.5 milliseconds on average with a maximum of 32 milliseconds. This is very, very slow compared with modern RTC-enabled TN matrixes.

The contrast and brightness parameters have improved, but not as much as to be noticed by an average user.

Does the ASUS VW192s differ from the VW191s? Not by much. It has got a decorative cap on the back panel. It doesn’t have a second analog input now, but did not acquire a digital one. It controls its brightness by means of backlight modulation rather than with the matrix. The setup quality and the response time of the ASUS VW192s have remained on the same, rather poor, level, making this model suitable only for processing text and simple graphics, which wouldn’t require an accurate reproduction of colors.